Horrors of Robotics
March 16, 2012 - 8:43 pm
Irradiated by LabRat
Irradiated by LabRat
Use headphones if you need to but watch this with the sound ON, not off. Without sound the video is merely weird. With sound it dropped me screaming into the deepest, most hellish trench of the uncanny valley.
A sensible voice from my intellect informs me this thing has a good training reason to exist and certainly beats going from printed page to real screaming bloody life with no difficulty slider. It’s drowned out by the gibbering from the rest of me that occasionally manages to babble that the noises the thing makes really do sound like it’s howling in pain, and occasionally almost like it’s trying Lamaze breathing.
March 17th, 2012 at 12:46 am
There is an appropriate technology version of this. Take a look at http://prontointernational.org/partopantstm-birth-simulator.html to see the same thing done with a little bit of sewing, a pair of scrub pants, and a trained facilitator. Their work is mostly in Latin America so the actual simulation videos are all in Spanish.
March 17th, 2012 at 8:29 am
Y’Know, honestly, I always was a bit curious about modern delivery techniques, so this was both pretty interesting and not quite as gross as the apendectomy I watched when I was 13. Having said that I am REALLY grateful for it postponing ANY desire I might have had for an early lunch.
And somehow, the ‘psycho’ music would seem more appropos if they were just looking for disconcerting noise to accustom the OBGYN staffers…
March 18th, 2012 at 1:40 pm
I don’t mean to alarm anyone, but was that a suction cup on a string that they used to retrieve FakeBaby?
…And salad tongs?
But seriously, what the hell is with the eldritch noises?
March 18th, 2012 at 1:42 pm
Ah, I get it now. It’s now slightly less likely that I’ll go apeshit on this thing with a sledgehammer if I see it.
March 18th, 2012 at 1:52 pm
I dodn’t know they could use suction cups…and I’d never seen forceps in action, kind of interesting…
March 18th, 2012 at 2:02 pm
I sure wish we’d had ‘some’ training other than 4 hours of classroom and watching ONE live birth before we got thrown in the field… Just sayin… And that noise IS rather weird…
March 19th, 2012 at 7:32 am
“With sound it dropped me screaming into the deepest, most hellish trench of the uncanny valley.”
You weren’t kidding, sister. (Insert gibbering in horror emoticon here.)
I can’t put my finger on why, but that was extremely disturbing.
March 19th, 2012 at 11:00 am
I’m not sure why I reacted the way I did, either. Logically that thing is an awesome training tool for anyone who’s potentially going to deal with a birth. I like awesome training tools.
Everything in my hindbrain wants to beat it to death with a tree branch. Something about the movements and noises it makes falls squarely in the sweet spot between alien and familiar labeled “THREAT!”
March 19th, 2012 at 12:41 pm
I guess if I learned how to deliver a baby with THAT in the background nothing else would ever seem as bad…? I dunno, I still vote for the psycho music.
March 21st, 2012 at 9:30 am
Yeah, I tell ya, as an EMT-I I am Officially Licensed to deliver babies, but holy Gods Above, I do not think I’m actually anything even vaguely like sufficiently trained to do so.
March 22nd, 2012 at 5:07 pm
It’s the sound. the visuals are really no big deal.